183: Chapter 183 Artificial Intelligence

The call was answered quickly.

"Hello, Zhao Yang?"

The Zhou Limin's tone was noticeably tense.

Over the past few days, because of that leak on Twitter by NIPS editor Charles, the public opinion on the domestic internet had almost turned upside down.

Major universities and research institutions were all inquiring about news from Yanlin University, and conspiracy theories online were running rampant. Unlike the previous situation with the number theory genius, running data and code could not simply be explained by talent.

It was too unreasonable!

As the Zhou Limin, he was under immense pressure, which had kept him on pins and needles for the past few days; he hadn't even been able to sleep well.

"Principal Zhou, the NIPS organizing committee just sent over the official acceptance letter."

Zhao Yang's tone remained steady, without any fluctuation of seeking credit or excitement.

"The paper has passed review and has even received a nomination for Best Paper."

"Good! Good, good, good!"

The Zhou Limin said the word "good" four times in a row on the other end of the line.

"These past few days, there's been all sorts of talk online, but since there hasn't been any accurate news about your paper, our school really hasn't been in a position to reply to anything. It's made the public opinion online incredibly chaotic!"

Principal Zhou said with a wry smile.

"Alright, it's good that you've officially confirmed the paper will be published. Should we prepare to hold a press conference immediately to respond to some of the rumors online?"

"Don't hold it yet."

Zhao Yang said to Principal Zhou.

"Why?" The Zhou Limin was a bit confused.

"Right now, it's just an email notification. Let's wait a while until the paper is officially published on the NIPS official website before we talk about it."

Zhao Yang said calmly.

"When that time comes, we can hold a press conference, and I will respond to those online comments all at once. If we issue a statement now, we will just fall into the quagmire of a war of words with them. There's no need to provide them with traffic."

To be honest, Zhao Yang had seen the online comments questioning whether he had faked his work or suspecting he had a team, even though he didn't usually go online.

He wasn't angry, but he couldn't let these people keep spreading rumors forever. Responding now wouldn't hold much meaning, honestly, since the paper hadn't been published yet.

The Zhou Limin pondered for a moment on the other end of the line and quickly understood Zhao Yang's intention.

"Good! We'll do as you say!"

The Zhou Limin agreed readily.

"Then the school will maintain silence for this period. Once you've set the time, the school's publicity department will fully cooperate with you."

Hanging up the phone, the Zhou Limin let out a long sigh of relief. Now that it was confirmed the paper would be published, many things would be much easier.

In the youth apartment.

Zhao Yang placed his phone back on the desk.

He opened the system inventory.

In a corner of the inventory lay the primary artificial intelligence core code he had obtained as a mission reward a long time ago.

"Extract."

As Zhao Yang gave the command, his right palm felt a slight heaviness, and he sensed a cold, metallic touch.

It was a silver-gray device only the size of an adult's thumb. It looked like an extremely ordinary USB flash drive, but there was no brand logo on the surface, and the material didn't feel like plastic or common aluminum alloy; it carried a cold, physical texture.

A flash of surprise crossed Zhao Yang's eyes; he hadn't expected the artificial intelligence core code provided by the system to be a physical object.

After examining it curiously for a while, Zhao Yang inserted the silver-gray USB device into the USB port of his computer case.

Just after the connection was made.

That silver-gray USB device, which had originally possessed a metallic texture, rapidly disintegrated after connecting to the computer.

It quickly turned into silver dust in the air and dissipated.

Zhao Yang watched this magical scene in surprise. What kind of material was this thing made of?

It was amazing!

It was a pity that not even a speck of this thing remained; otherwise, he could have studied it a little.

Zhao Yang sighed slightly in his heart.

At the same time the USB disappeared, the computer monitor screen quickly turned into a black terminal window.

Lines of code began to scroll.

The language structure of these codes was very peculiar; it wasn't any common programming language, but rather an unknown language similar to an instruction set.

Zhao Yang stared intently at the screen.

The code scrolled for about three minutes and then stopped abruptly.

An extremely crude dialogue input box popped up in the center of the screen, with a line of white prompt text above it:

System initialized. Awaiting input.

Zhao Yang placed his hands on the keyboard.

Was this the primary artificial intelligence produced by the system? It didn't even seem to have a UI interface; was it a bit too primitive?

Zhao Yang felt a bit uncertain and suspicious.

He decided to conduct a basic Turing test first.

After more than a dozen rounds of testing, Zhao Yang's brows furrowed tighter and tighter.

He was deeply disappointed.

Judging from the interaction capabilities displayed so far, the intelligence level of this so-called artificial intelligence not only failed to reach the level of GPT-4 or Claude from his previous life in 2024, but it was even inferior to the early, stumbling first-generation large language models.

Its responses were extremely rigid and lacked contextual understanding.

If a question was even slightly convoluted, it would freeze or even give nonsensical answers. It struggled even with the simplest continuous conversations.

"What kind of artificial intelligence is this? Or rather, does this thing even count as intelligent?"

Zhao Yang took his hands off the keyboard, his eyes filled with doubt.

He didn't believe the artificial intelligence rewarded by the system would be such a defective product.

He brought up the backend and activated the code refactoring skill he had just acquired to inspect the underlying core database of this AI.

After checking for a while, Zhao Yang was quickly stunned.

Even though he now possessed an IQ of 179 and a max-level LV5 foundation in Informatics, he was completely unable to understand the operating mechanism of more than half of this core code when facing it.

After examining it for quite a while, he roughly understood.

The reason this AI behaved so "artificially idiotic" wasn't because its algorithm was backward, but because it was an embryo without any data accumulation.

Its underlying architecture was so advanced that it was beyond Zhao Yang's current understanding, but its database was completely empty.

Without a massive amount of high-quality corpus feeding it, and without powerful computing power as a foundation, it could only display the most primitive conditioned reflexes on this current computer.

"It seems that if I want it to be useful, I have to slowly cultivate it with a large amount of high-quality corpus."

Zhao Yang concluded. This was a cultivation project that required long-term investment in computing power and data.

It would be impossible to make it do anything very useful in the short term!

Thinking of this, he suspended the background process and let the AI program go into hibernation locally. The artificial intelligence matter would have to be left as is for now; haste makes waste.

Having finished the high-intensity paper writing and system upgrades over the past few days, and with his Informatics level successfully raised to LV5, Zhao Yang decided to give his tense nerves a break and relax a little.